So we kicked off our Shadowrun campaign yesterday, and unfortunately, it did not go quite as smoothly as I had hoped. In my mind, I envisioned a smooth experience, quick responsiveness, solid audio, and overall a very fun game. What we actually had was technical difficulties, slow responsiveness, mediocre audio, and a fairly frustrating scenario. Although we were able to touch on the basics of the game, and even start a simple scenario, the going was pretty rough overall. Although the characters were completed, I didn’t have a final copy of each, so I didn’t have a reference point to refer to for each of the remote players. This made it very difficult to explain and confirm very simple aspects of the game mechanics. Most of the players are only familiar with Pathfinder, so a change to the Shadowrun mechanics is a foreign language – and there was definitely some language barrier issues. In a traditional game, this would have been less of a concern, I could lean over and provide guidance. But thru Roll20, you are limited to voice alone. With bad or troubling audio for several of the players, it was almost a non-starter.
Overall, I think my biggest issue was really on my part – being overly optimistic about how to start and set up the game. I had grand plans to stream the session to YouTube, add external music and sound effects, and generally run the game like the format I am so used to. But all the extra addons made the game clunky rather than smooth, and I think contributed to the software’s slower performance. We did end up streaming the session, but I can only imagine how rough it would be to watch.
For our next game in two weeks, I am going to eliminate all the extra pieces. Once we get a handle on the game system, and how everything works, then I can introduce extra pieces. But until then, I am convinced that the extra complexity simply doesn’t add any value at this time.
